“All right,” said Kornei, but did not go, and began to clear the table.  Nekhludoff looked at Kornei and an ill feeling sprung up in his heart toward him.  He wished to be left in peace, and it seemed as if everybody were spitefully worrying him.  When Kornei had left, Nekhludoff went over to the samovar, intending to make some tea, but, hearing the footsteps of Agrippina Petrovna, he hastily walked into the drawing-room, closing the door behind him.  This was the room in which, three months ago, his mother had died.  Now, as he entered this room, lighted by two lamps with reflectors—­one near a portrait of his father, the other near a portrait of his mother—­he thought of his relations toward his mother, and these relations seemed to him unnatural and repulsive.  These, too, were shameful and disgusting.  He remembered how, during her last sickness, he wished her to die.  He said to himself that he wished it so that she might be spared the suffering, but in reality he wished to spare himself the sight of her suffering.

Desiring to call forth pleasant recollections about her, he looked at her portrait, painted by a famous artist for five thousand rubles.  She was represented in a black velvet dress with bared breast.  The artist had evidently drawn with particular care the breast and the beautiful shoulders and neck.  That was particularly shameful and disgusting.  There was something revolting and sacriligious to him in this representation of his mother as a denuded beauty, the more so because three months ago she lay in this very room shrunken like a mummy, and filling the entire house with an oppressive odor.  He thought he could smell the odor now.  He remembered how, on the day before she died, she took his strong, white hand into her own emaciated, discolored one, and, looking into his eyes, said:  “Do not judge me, Mitia, if I have not done as I should,” and her faded eyes filled with tears.

“How disgusting!” he again repeated to himself, glancing at the half-nude woman with splendid marble shoulders and arms and a triumphant smile on her lips.  The bared bosom of that portrait reminded him of another young woman whom he had seen dressed in a similar way a few days before.  It was Missy, who had invited him to the house under some pretext, in order to display before him her ball-dress.  He recalled with disgust her beautiful shoulders and arms; and her coarse, brutal father, with his dark past, his cruelties, and her mother with her doubtful reputation.  All this was disgusting and at the same time shameful.

“No, no; I must free myself from all these false relations with the Korchagins, with Maria Vasilievna, with the inheritance and all the rest,” he thought.  “Yes, to breathe freely; to go abroad—­to Rome—­and continue to work on my picture.”  He remembered his doubts about his talent.  “Well, it is all the same; I will simply breathe freely.  First, I will go to Constantinople, then to Rome—­away from this jury duty.  Yes, and to fix matters with the lawyer——­”